Personal care compositions are well known and widely used. Desirable personal care composition must meet a number of criteria. For example, in order to be acceptable to consumers, a personal care composition must exhibit good cleaning properties, must exhibit good lathering characteristics, must be mild to the skin (not cause drying or irritation) and preferably should even provide a conditioning benefit to the skin. Multi-phase personal cleansing compositions provide such benefits and can be made with a combination of structured surfactant phase and a benefit phase for moisturization. These types of multi-phase compositions can even be visually distinct.
It is desired to produce visually distinct compositions that are mild, and stable at a reasonable cost to the consumer. One method of producing mild compositions that are cost effective would be to minimize the surfactant level. Another method to produce a mild composition is to add a hydrophobic benefit phase. Very mild, personal care compositions can be prepared with the combination of low surfactant level and the presence of a hydrophobic benefit phase. However, minimizing surfactant level can cause instability in the surfactant phase which can be further exacerbated by adding hydrophobic benefit agents leading to loss of structure. Moreover, the lather volume of the personal care composition is reduced due to the combination of less surfactant and the presence of a hydrophobic component. Thus, it is difficult to create a mild, stable, high lathering personal cleansing composition with a low surfactant level in the presence of a hydrophobic benefit phase.
Accordingly, the need still remains for a structured multi-phase personal care composition that provides cleansing with increased lather longevity and improved lathering characteristics, and skin benefits such as improved clinical dry skin, silky skin feel, improved soft skin feel, and improved smooth skin feel with low levels of surfactants present in the composition.